


The Choice You Make

by Cloudfield



Series: Where There's Smoke [2]
Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-12-30 17:17:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12113475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cloudfield/pseuds/Cloudfield
Summary: Harry and Tom debrief after the events of Non Sequitur. Meanwhile Tom's been giving away more about what he wants than Harry thinks he's probably aware, in more ways than one.





	The Choice You Make

**Author's Note:**

> You guys, I'm honestly just really sorry about this whole thing. It's criminally long for what it is. Also this was completed using a transcript for reference and was written, edited, and posted from an iPhone because moving, having your laptop need formatting, and waiting two weeks to have internet installed sucks.

Harry’s not _beside himself,_ not yet - but he knows he hasn't said anything that makes sense yet either, and Tom, sitting with one knee to his chin and the other leg tucked under him at the foot of Harry’s bed, seems to be inclined to tread carefully and let whatever he's trying to say come at its own pace. It would be a nice idea, if only Harry knew what he was trying to say.

“I woke up, and y— and everyone was gone,” he's babbling, pacing the floor. Tom lets his slip pass, but Harry knows him better than to let himself believe Tom could have missed it. Still, though: it’s not that he's beside Harry every morning or even most, but that he was gone altogether. “Or - or I was. Back in San Francisco, star date 49011. Today. And she was there. Libby was there. It _was_ her. She smelled like her perfume and she felt like…” Harry stops there, flushing a little. She felt like _Libby,_ and he doesn't know how to describe that to Tom beyond the distinction between feminine and masculine, not in bed or out of it, not in any but the ways they differ. Plain description of Libby not only seems like sharing something he wants to be solely his, it seems disrespectful to Tom, as if it would be a listing of his inadequacies even though Harry doesn't want the same thing from Tom as from Libby. Tom wouldn't take it that way, of course not, no more than Harry would mean it that way, but it wouldn't keep Harry from feeling like that was what he'd done.

Libby feels like childhood summer in his family’s home in South Carolina, like the piece of his charmed, halcyon youth he got to take with him when he left it behind, and Tom feels like the only soft place he’s had to land he's ever had away from it; the Academy had been formative but it had never been meant to be more than transitional, and his friends from those years are scattered to the wind, even within charted space. Libby feels like home always used to and Tom feels like the the burgeoning realization that even all the way out here he can still have another, and he can't tell Tom that, either - he doesn't even much like thinking about it himself, because thinking about it makes him try to put a word to it - so he's lost.

Tom takes pity on him with a roll of his eyes. “Yeah yeah, Academy sweetheart, Harry, been there, done that.” Harry knows it's not that easy for him, knows the fate of that particular infatuation, and Tom knows it's not the same, but Harry knows it wasn't an invitation for him to respond, it was an attempt to get him to keep talking, and he's got enough he needs to talk about to accept it gratefully.

“Tom, I was never on _Voyager,_ and neither were you, but, so - so you were there - and she was her, but you weren't you. You…. were in Marseilles. On parole.”

Tom hides his wince behind a low whistle, though not well. “I'm guessing you didn't like what you found,” he says, tone neutral. “Not that I’d blame you.”

It's not like Tom hasn't admitted it - that he knew Auckland wouldn't have made a lasting change in him, even though he'd found peace in his work there and fortitude in his health returning over his stay - but it's still a bit jarring, to see him seem to know with such ease what Harry found in France. If you knew, Harry wonders, why the hell wouldn't you try and change it?

But Harry’s not looking at the Tom Paris whose actions only resembled the man he knows in what had to be the last few hours of his life - they were just there, way past the point of no return, and if that other Tom hadn't made Harry commit to their plan, it would all have been for nothing. Harry knows almost every button he could hit on the man in front of him, and he's still not sure he could get this Tom to lash out the way his counterpart had, not physically. He knows too that he'd have a harder time neutralizing it if Tom did, if he could do it at all.

They're not the same, this Tom and the other one, except for the flashes there’d been where they _almost_ were. The murky flicker of hurt in the alternate’s identically blue eyes when Harry dressed him down in Sandrine’s, before he tried to come after him and failed in his impairment, that had been so similar it had embedded itself somewhere beneath Harry’s skin. And sure, he’d been thinking of Danny Byrd, too - his best friend, once, Libby had been right, and Harry had known just a little how people must have felt for him, when they heard about _Voyager;_ he'd almost believed for a moment what they must have - that there was no way, that _Voyager_ and its crew must be gone forever, not merely lost. Without Tom at the helm those first few days, they might have been, for all Harry knew.

If he could get back, at least he'd _know,_ and suddenly he'd needed that more than he’d ever wanted to be home. Janeway, B’Elanna, Chakotay, Kes, Sam and her as-yet unborn child… he couldn't live with any of them on his conscience, even if they were safe, somewhere half a galaxy away.

If he didn't particularly want to live out his days in a world where Tom Paris drank himself to death somewhere on the Mediterranean seaside and wouldn't call him by his name, it was secondary.

Here in his proper timestream, the thought of Tom reminds Harry that Tom had left off somewhere that had to be vulnerable, for him - if his Tom and the other Tom are hard for Harry to reconcile, Tom's just admitted he's never stopped seeing them as the same guy, and how could he? Harry hadn't stopped being the iteration of himself he knew he was for a change in scenery.

“No, I didn't like what I found,” Harry says honestly, because sugarcoating it won't get him anywhere. “And it sure sounds like you know what I found, too.”

“Just tell me I didn't try and turn you into one of my French girls,” Tom deadpans, anything else he feels concealed beneath it. “Though I did always have a sense for who might be looking to slum it, and you never would have been.”

Harry snorts a laugh, if only because he knows it's what Tom’s looking for. “No, I got between you and your first love and things got off on the wrong foot from there. You're still pretty touchy about people getting in your way when you're setting up a shot, actually. Though not so surly about it, I'll admit.” Tom laughs in return, at that, but Harry doesn't want to linger over this - Tom knows who he was, who he might have been, and that's not the point. “You saved me in the end there, you know.”

Tom gives little more than the slightest tip of his head, but asks, “Oh yeah?” Harry can tell how badly he wants to believe it.

“I went back to San Francisco alone,” Harry tells him, omitting the desolation he'd felt - everyone thought he was sick or crazy, but he'd thought surely the one person who was as displaced as he was must understand, that somehow Tom would know in his gut that this wasn't right. “And when I got home, my… I guess he must have been my partner on the shuttle project I was working on was there. Guy named Lieutenant James Lasca.”

“James Lasca,” Tom repeats with a moue. “About my age, engineering - it sounds like it must have been engineering, you wouldn't have been anywhere else - pompous ass?”

Harry frowns. “Over a barrel, anyway. They thought I woke up crazy, remember, and I… think we were friends, before then.”

“No, if it's the Lasca I know, he was a jerk,” Tom says. “And it sounds like it was. Hell, I remember him telling me something about a shuttle project, last time I saw him. Nothing much, of course, and probably wrapped up by now, but… I wasn't convinced you didn't hit your head, Harry, but that's a heck of a coincidence.”

“Don't try and make sense of it,” Harry advises, “because it happened to me, and I still can't. I'm just a bit…”

“You're fit to be tied, Harry. Reasonably so,” Tom adds with more understanding than he'd started with, like maybe no matter how much this whole thing defies belief he's starting to understand it really was more than a fever dream. He pats the spot beside him on the bed. “Sit down and try it from the top. Just the facts as you see them, this time.”

And Harry doesn't want to, still a mass of nervous energy, but he's got to admit he's getting nowhere this way, vacillating from one thought to another in a way he can't hope to make coherent, let alone make Tom understand. He'd gotten it out to the captain this way, black and white and devoid of emotion, and if he'd hoped to vent a bit with Tom… Maybe he needs to make sense of it, first, in the retelling. He sits, Tom reaches out to squeeze his hand, and it's almost a shock how grounding it is. Tom's kept a measured distance from him since they left the bridge, where Harry's quick touch to Tom's shoulder had been enough to assure him the other man was real, but the reciprocation and continued contact send it slamming into him. Tom's here, even though he's got to be dead, and that means Harry must be too, because neither of them would have survived that explosion. 

The air smells of the ship’s usual filtrated not quite nothing, almost like a hospital back in Federation space, and his room’s just as he left it. In the privacy of her ready room Janeway had smelled like coffee and something familiar and lightly floral and Tom smells of whatever it is he replicates to dab at his throat and wrists after he shaves in the mornings, something Harry even knows the chemical bittersweet taste of, still lingering but less sharp after his shift. _Voyager_ hums around him at the edges of his awareness, a hundred things he can just barely feel at once and use to sense instinctively that all is well.

For the first time since he got back, Harry breathes consciously, in then out. He does it again, just to prove he can.

Tom's voice is soft, barely audible when he asks, “Better?”

Harry swallows hard. “I think so,” he admits. “I was on the _Drake,_ and things went to hell. You know how…” he stops to breathe again. “You know how they told us back at the Academy that by the time we shipped out, we'd be able to not freeze up when things went wrong?” Tom nods. “Well, I didn't. You of all people must know: you don't. You don't panic at all. It's like you're in this trance where you know everything you need to do and there's no room for anything else. I'm not the adrenaline junkie you are, but I can see where it gets addictive, to be honest.”

Tom's thumb shifts to his wrist and his fingers curl around the tips of Harry’s own and Harry realizes he's questing for a pulse and feeling for a tremor when he asks mildly, “Sure you shouldn't get checked out in sickbay?”

“If they hauled us in for stress reactions every time something went wrong with a shuttle we'd never get anything done around here,” Harry sighs, not without humour and with no particular defensiveness. “All I meant was, I was in that frame of mind, and then I heard the captain, and then I heard Libby. _Saw_ Libby.”

From there he manages to relay the whole affair once more, just the facts as he knows them, the way Tom had said. He glosses over Marseilles and he can tell Tom's letting him away with it rather than accepting what he says at face value.

“Sounds pretty wild,” Tom says with sympathy when he's done. It's all he's said the whole time, since Harry started telling the story again.

“I feel like I should ask you to pinch me,” Harry laughs, feeling better still for finally having managed to say it all. “But I'm here. This is what's real, I knew that as soon as I saw you on the bridge. It just didn't sink in for awhile.”

Tom looks like he's considering that, and Harry feels himself blush. That can't have been a strictly necessary detail.

“Harry,” Tom starts slowly, “if you don't want to answer me - or if you can't - I'll understand. But why’d you do it? Why’d you come back, when all you wanted this whole time…?”

“Because I’m supposed to be here,” Harry says with conviction. He's been sure of that since the last time he spoke to Cosimo. “Because Danny’s supposed to be in that office at HQ; he was always better with theory and I was better on my feet.” 

It surprises Harry how much he believes that, now he's said it. Danny might not have survived his first confrontation with B’Elanna, anyway, too prickly and with too much pride of his own to temper her and help her be as resilient and brilliant as Harry knows she is. Too much history, which had surprised him to learn in a 'small universe' sort of way: that they'd attended primary school together on Kessik IV and Danny had been… a thoughtless kid, maybe, because Harry had never known him to be a bully, but in fairness to B'Elanna, she'd been the same age, and Harry knows it's no sure salve on an old wound to hear that someone who hurt you had changed. 

Besides, Harry and B’Elanna are a good team, and Danny and B’Elanna likely would not have been. Danny would never have befriended Tom, and maybe Tom would never have gone looking for Danny and B’Elanna, wouldn't have been there to carry Chakotay off that rusted staircase… Maybe Danny wouldn't have been the one the Caretaker took to that Ocampan hospital in the first place. There are hundreds of millions of tiny variables from the beginning and more than he can quantify after this long - more than could be quantified before they ever left Deep Space Nine - and Harry's a part of all of them.

“Things happen for a reason, huh?” Tom asks wryly, and Harry has to wonder if he'd been thinking out loud. He's sure he hadn't spoken, but Tom makes it sound like his face made his thoughts clear enough that he hadn't needed to.

“From an individual’s perspective, it's hard not to think so, sometimes,” Harry says, a bit embarrassed to hear it said like that. It's not how the universe works; he knows that. But they're here, alive, and Harry would do it all over again, and even as foreign as the other Tom had been to him, Harry knows he would have, too.

‘ _If you're right, then things will be changed back to the way they're supposed to be, and you'll find me back on_ Voyager.’

Tom’s not so far off thinking the two of him were the same, Harry realizes. The Tom he knows better, they've clicked since the bar on Deep Space Nine, but the one who’s gone now - he'd gone halfway across his world from a place Harry knows he considered the nearest thing he had to a home and then to his death on the off chance Harry wasn't lying or insane, either that or he'd been seduced by wanting something better for himself. What had made him agree to being _Voyager’s_ tag along probably hadn't been so different.

Harry sets his jaw. “It wasn't right, Tom,” he says. “We don’t belong on Earth right now, for better or worse. You don't belong in that bar, and I…” This is going to sound foolish, Harry knows it is, but it's the truth, had been the first major source of disquiet for him on Earth, after the initial shock of waking next to Libby. “I had picture windows all along the wall facing the bay in that apartment. Like the observation deck, but with the city outside of them instead of the stars. It was beautiful, but looking at them made me want to panic. It wasn't like shore leave.”

“You're institutionalized,” Tom remarks. “Take it from an old hand, twice over. It's perfectly normal, but you'd have gotten used to it.”

“The Academy’s basic curriculum didn't change that much in less than ten years,” Harry says dryly. “It wasn't just that. I belong out here. _You_ belong out here. And neither of us were.”

Tom considers that for too long, his chin in his free hand and his tongue sliding thoughtfully between his lips, and he's hesitant and wide eyed when he says, “Y’know, you keep mentioning me.” 

Harry doesn't know what he's going to say to that, the look on Tom's face or what he's said, and shifts uncomfortably before settling on, "You're the one I'm talking to. You're also the only one from _Voyager_ who was _there,_ too." Harry thinks at least that it sounds reasonable, whether or not it would hold up to scrutiny.

Tom seems to have developed an abrupt fascination with Harry's comforter, fixating on the spot he's picking at with his free hand. “Harry… I'm not saying you did or you didn't, but if you came back for me - don't ever do anything that stupid on my account ever again.”

“It wasn't,” Harry starts, indignant, before realizing just how transparent a lie it would be to claim his coming back had had nothing to do with Tom, even if Tom appeared to take it at face value, “it wasn't just you. You were… a consideration. In fact, you were - _he_ was - you were the only reason I made it. But it wasn't just you.” Harry’s confident in that, at least, though he finds he doesn't want to analyze the balance of his motivations, either. “It was a mistake I was ever there. They told me as much, the people that caused it. Sent someone to look out for me, make sure I was okay. And you know what he said? That it was obvious I wasn't.”

And that can't be put solely down to Tom Paris. Tom’s his best friend, his sometimes bed mate, and he's _still_ holding Harry’s hand in a way that doesn't quite match up with either of those things, but it had been wrong before he'd even looked up _Voyager’s_ crew manifest. Hell, who knows? Maybe Tom's more right than Harry would like to admit and if he'd had the counselling and reintegration services Starfleet would have provided to anyone in a similar but more believable circumstance, he'd have recovered well enough. Harry has his doubts, but it's possible. Possible, but far from a sure thing. It wouldn't have been fair to Libby, no matter how he loved her, to have her be stuck with him if he was going to have one foot in their life and the other in the past he knew was real.

By now Harry had half resolved to treat the interlude as a dream, and that decision was solidifying the more he considered it. What else was there to do? Either way, there would have been a set of memories he had to discard, and other than a few precious moments where he'd been calmed by Libby’s closeness, his two days back in San Francisco had been marked by confusion and carefully guarded fear. He must have known in his gut he couldn't stay from the first second, or he'd have reached out to his parents.

He wonders if he should find some peace in having chosen to be here, but he doesn't know for certain that he does. He’s more relieved to be here than he ever was to be in the home he'd known was a lie, but even still, to have been so briefly surrounded by people and places he knows he may not see again for the better part of the next century if at all feels something like a bandage ripping off of a nearly healed wound, peeling away random bits of new flesh and coping mechanisms with it.

Tom’s looking at him intently. “I'm not so sure you're okay now, either,” he says, frowning. “If I can help…”

“Maybe you should go,” Harry croaks before he's really thought about it. He has to correct himself, not quite in time to keep from noticing that Tom looks slightly stung. “No, stay. I don't… I'm confused,” he admits helplessly. “And not just about the temporal mechanics of it all.”

“That'd be reason enough, but I get it,” Tom says, his smile strained and muted. “Hey, uh…” Tom takes his hand back so he can use both to steady himself on the bed and lean a little towards Harry. There's something on the tip of his tongue, just out of reach, and Harry knows the look and the tone but it doesn't usually take him so long to collect his words. “It's just a thought, but - look, do you trust me?”

Harry huffs an anxious laugh. He does, of course he does, but…

“The way you put that doesn't exactly inspire my confidence,” he points out. “But yes.”

Tom laughs, seeming as ill at ease as Harry feels, then takes a long, deep breath. “You know - and I'm not saying this is the same - but you know I used to have nightmares, right?”

He still does, but if he doesn't know that Harry won't be the one to tell him. Not with the violence he once did, so far as Harry can tell - bad dreams, not night terrors - and they never seem to wake him, now, but Harry's moulded himself to Tom in the wee hours of ship’s night more than once, to stop him shifting and whimpering in a way that’s too focussed to be simple unrest in a light phase of sleep. Harry’s not really following him yet, but says, carefully neutral, “Yeah.”

“There was a girl...” Tom falters. “There was a girl, and she used to do this thing - hell, that sounded wrong. It wasn't a sex thing, I swear.” Tom’s blushing now; he doesn't embarrass easily but his complexion does absolutely nothing to hide it when he does, the glow underscoring tiny pinprick freckles spattered across his cheekbones. “It's gonna sound weird. But you seem really jumpy, and it always helped me.”

“Spit it out, Tom,” Harry demands, impatient and only more unsettled for the way Tom's skirting around whatever it is he wants to do.

“Right,” Tom says under his breath, still an interesting shade of pink. “So the thing is, you're probably going to want your shirt off. I know I said… Okay, so I wouldn't offer to do this if we'd never - but trust me, all right?”

Harry spends a moment sizing him up. The look on Tom's face right now would make him tease and prod in public, might make him pry about its origins or tickle it away, here in private, but this time Harry does neither. “I do,” he affirms again, “but why don't you just tell me…?”

“Easier to show; it sounds really weird until you try it,” Tom says, then appears to make a decision, blue eyes rising to meet Harry's unrelentingly. His hands go to Harry's sides and press into his undershirt. “May I?” he asks, without a trace of the levity the phrasing would usually rise in him.

Harry's shirt is already untucked so he nods. When his arms are up over his head he stops to grab his right wrist with his other hand and stretch until his spine pops, then lets Tom do most of the work involved in removing his sweater. Tom's fingertips run up over Harry's skin only incidentally, just enough to tickle and fan a tiny spark of interest in him that's smothered by his nerves and curiosity, and while Harry hadn't doubted him he knows now for certain that this can’t be sexually motivated. Tom touches and tastes like he’s been starved of it, when that's what he's after, and this is too gentle and halting for that, like he's an undiagnosed trauma victim whose condition might be exacerbated by the slightest wrong move.

Still, when he's rid of his shirt, Harry can see Tom _wants_ to kiss him, eyes lingering too long at his mouth, and impulsively Harry makes the decision for him. Tom kisses him back just enough that it's not a refusal, just pursing his lips against Harry's own, then draws back and shifts to settle with his legs crossed.

“Get on your stomach for me?” Tom requests, and he was right to warn Harry how weird this might be, because it's not that unlike how he is when they're in bed for other reasons at all - Tom seldom makes outright verbal demands, and it's not so uncommon for even his requests to start out almost this meek. When he wants something, he makes it happen, no mistake about that, but mostly he does it with his body, unspoken. It had been surprising at first, given his propensity for chatter.

Harry’s never outright refused him - he's never wanted to - and only rarely slowed him down for clarification, but even as he obliges he finds he's feeling uncomfortably exposed in a way he wouldn't, if he was expecting to be stripped totally bare. “Tom…” he tries, and stops there. He can't just want to give Harry a massage, surely - he'd just say as much, if that was it.

The bed shifts and Harry feels Tom sidle up to him, still sitting. “Just relax,” Tom murmurs near his ear. “Put your head down and close your eyes. I'm just going to touch you, okay?”

And now Harry's even more puzzled, because that, too, seems like something Tom could have just said - if Tom's more yielding than Harry would have anticipated, he's never been overtly timid - but he sighs and rests his chin in the cradle of his elbows and agrees, “All right.”

The first touch of Tom’s hand at the small of his back makes him startle, and Tom makes a low, soothing noise and sweeps his thumb from Harry's hipbone into the hollow of his spine. It doesn't really make him relax, at first; Harry feels like he's waiting for something and doesn't know what. But he does stay still, and then Tom plants his other hand flat on the middle of Harry's back and works his palms over Harry's skin, too firm to tickle and too light to dig into the tension. Questions bubble up and die in his throat, and Harry feels like most of them have been answered when Tom's hands start stroking over his back with that same force, like he's a sick kid or a wounded animal. For a minute he's waiting for something to change, but Tom just keeps on mapping his back, hands flattening into the divots of Harry’s ribs and the dips beneath his shoulder blades, persistently enough that Harry's skin starts to tingle in his wake. Nothing stays untouched long enough for the warmth to settle into him at first brush, and when Tom doesn't say any more or alter his touch more than at random, Harry feels himself start to relax under it. It is definitely _different,_ this not quite glancing contact, but much as Tom taking his hand had been grounding, this is even more so, now that he's not buzzing with uncertainty.

Given context, Harry can even see why Tom thought this might be helpful, certainly can see why it would be if he'd woken gasping in the night, disoriented and half in a dream. It's keeping him in the moment, entirely here; he's in his bed on _Voyager_ and there's no chance of his escaping that or forgetting Tom's presence. If he wanted to it might be a different story, but having been so recently displaced, there’s something about the constant reminder that sets him at ease. 

“There you go,” Tom murmurs, no more than that, like he's caught up and sensed Harry's surrender.

“Yeah.” Harry knows it's far from articulate and means almost nothing, but Tom must glean something near enough to what he wants from it, because he gives a similar hum and his hands keep moving.

Harry has enough presence of mind to wonder that he's not feeling any especial desire from the steady touch - he could get there if he focussed on it, more quickly for the skin contact, but it's not stirring anything much in him on it’s own, just lulling him deeper and deeper into a dreamy hypnosis. The fear and uncertainty are gone, now, even if they're only masked, and his limbs are rapidly pooling with a lassitude that couldn't be more complete even if Tom was digging into the knots in his muscles. If anything it's more relaxing without the edge of pain, letting his brain fog over without the distraction.

Harry drifts with it for a while, losing awareness of his surroundings enough that he thinks he might doze. When his mind does surface, his skin is warm with friction and Tom hasn't slowed, just kept on with the lingering, inexorable contact, and finally Harry has to mumble, “You could have said.”

He can practically feel Tom’s pleased grin in the sudden trip of his fingertips. “Feel better, then?”

“I feel like mush,” Harry groans. The tension’s long gone and the absence has made him aware that his body hasn't entirely failed to respond to the touch the way he'd expected at first. “Which might be an improvement,” he admits under his breath, not sure he's capable of anything louder.

“I don't know that I'd call it mush,” Tom says, “but you've definitely gone from, oh, duranium to something that feels a lot more like skin.” He sounds too pleased with himself, but his voice is as soft as Harry's own, like he's trying not to break the spell he's woven.

“Yeah, well, not everywhere,” Harry mutters. “It's a nice idea, but biology being what it is…”

Harry senses rather than sees Tom's chuckle. “Here I am trying to be nice, and you with your mind in the gutter,” he teases.

Harry’s a touch affronted. “Come on, you really never, when she did that to you?”

“Wasn't always in the frame of mind, Harry,” Tom points out, and even though he sounds nothing other than blandly reasonable and he still hasn’t stopped working over Harry's back like he's a particularly indulged house cat, Harry feels something like shame, to have put it that way. For Harry this has been a way to root himself in the present - for Tom, it sounds like this has been a way to fend off his demons, and Harry's had fleeting contact with enough of them to know it's not as pat as Tom likes to make it seem.

“Right,” Harry says on a breath. “Your hands have got to be tired, though, and I really do feel better.”

Tom does stop, abruptly, but then he leans down and Harry can feel Tom's breath hot on the back of his neck when he says, “I wasn't saying no.”

Tom does that, Harry's noticed. It's not that he doesn't say yes, because he does, verbally and otherwise, but as often as that, especially when they haven't actually started anything yet, it's that he's _not saying no,_ that he's open to the idea. Harry suspects it's Tom’s way of leaving the ball in his court, allowing his conscience some form of plausible deniability. It rankles him somewhat - as though Tom still thinks Harry needs an out, that somehow he still thinks either Harry’s so suggestible or he himself is such a compelling negative influence that Harry couldn't handle himself without it being offered. Neither of those things are true, of course - and if Harry's entirely honest, which he has to be, with his defences down like this, a lot of what bothers him about it is that Tom should know both of those things by now, about Harry and about himself.

Harry’s never been like Tom; he's never sought to bury his fears or disappointments in another person and he's certainly never realized at some point in those proceedings that he might never even have known their name, but’s he’s not the naïf people seem to decide he is without his input, either. If there was any truth to it at all, it was only that he'd learned first with other boys, at school, and had floundered when he realized he'd entirely missed that sort of practice with girls. By the time he'd had any real opportunity for romantic engagement with women, they were - well, they were women, and Harry thought not as likely to tolerate the fumbling he was sure he'd subject them to. By the time he'd left the Academy, Libby had not seemed to have complaints - she never had; he could take instruction - and he'd found, after trying it, that people were people and if he'd done everything else right adjusting to what was between their legs wasn't so difficult. You had to pay attention and have an honest investment in what you were doing, that was all.

Or that had always been Harry's estimation, at any rate. Any time he'd ever tried to have sex just because he could - because the offer was there and the other person was attractive enough physically to catch his interest - it hadn't been worth it, at least on his end. It was too hard to enjoy himself at all, when he was already plotting his escape. When it's felt right, some of his best memories are from after: beer and pizza curled up in the sheets with Libby, bickering about crumbs in the bed, going back to their textbooks with a renewed focus and an ease in the air with Sean, and even those times with Tom where one of them stays, lapsing fluidly back into the comfortable verbal sparring that seems to denote much of their public relationship. Harry can't do things like this without attaching some degree of meaning to them, even if he sometimes encapsulates that meaning as an expression of trust rather than raw emotion.

There's been guilt all along with Tom, worst that when he'd left that first night and lesser all the time but continuing to niggle at him, if he dwells on it. After this long, his recent involuntary foray into what might have been aside, Libby would think he was being utterly medieval. She'd be telling him not to suffer - that facts were facts and it wasn't like him to deny them this way. She'd like Tom, come to that, in much the same way she'd liked Danny. She’d probably be glad there was someone else around to make him take time to see the enjoyment and humour in things. The truth is that at the beginning, he'd been going to lose his mind for without some way to help him cope, and Tom had been safe. He’d tended towards, as far as Harry could tell, casual affairs with people he remained otherwise friendly with. He'd proven that assessment correct, since. Tom was as quick to offer him an escape with no hard feelings as to offer to let him stay and he seemed to have a talent for knowing which one Harry needed.

Tom seems to have a talent for knowing what Harry needs, full stop, and his early flightiness aside, he seems to get as much from giving it to him as from anything Harry actually does _to_ him. Harry couldn't have failed to notice by now, the way his eyes shoot to nearly black lined with deep sapphire when Harry puts Tom to his knees or presses him against a bulkhead, the way Tom's always just that bit too quick to comply with anything he so much as suggests. It's exhilarating, there's no denying it, but there's something about it that's _frightening,_ too, because Harry's not inclined to push, but he thinks he could. He'd worry he was taking advantage of Tom's insecurities, wonder if the other man was so eager to please him because of the misplaced gratitude Harry sometimes hears despite the other man's best efforts, but Tom's so obviously getting something more from it that Harry's never brought it up.

It's not that kind of arrangement, anyway. Tom doesn't want it that way and Harry's not sure he does, either - Harry's always had a small circle of very close friends, people he'd probably readily die for, if asked, so it's not like the intensity of this particular attachment is completely unfamiliar to him, no matter what else they get up to in secret. But for all that he knows he shouldn't say it, it's sat on the tip of his tongue more than once - damn it, tell me what it is you need and what we're doing here, and I'll do my best to give it to you. It's no less than Tom's owed, what he's been doing this whole time for Harry, but Harry can't think of a way to say it that wouldn't almost certainly cross lines he can't quite discern to be able to toe.

"Harry?" Tom's back to sounding concerned, the purr gone from his voice. "You still with me, here?"

Wonderful. He's been calmed from his ordeal only to work himself into a furor again. It may be his own fault, but Harry can't help but wonder if there really is something as intrinsically provoking about Tom Paris as other people seem to believe, sometimes. Harry hasn't known anyone yet who Tom leaves lukewarm.

Harry rolls onto his back to look Tom in the eye, because Tom sounds like he's about to overreact again and suggest sickbay or who knows what well meaning but unwelcome thing. He forces a smile and says, "Just fine. Still kind of… Spaced out? But I'm good." Once again Tom doesn't look entirely convinced, and even though there's a part of Harry it doesn't sit entirely well with, he figures he can distract Tom from his concern easily enough. "I could be better, though. Come here?" He shouldn't, it makes him feel worse, but he knows he'll get his way when he adds, "Please?"It occurs to him fleetingly that he _wouldn't_ feel so bad about it, if he were being honest - that somewhere between when this had all started and now it became as much or more _Tom_ that he wants as just physical release, but then Tom's sprawling out beside him on his elbow and laying the fingers of his free hand so the tips rest at Harry's collarbone and Harry shifts up to kiss him, half because he wants to and half to quiet the voices in his head.

It doesn't last long and it doesn't get that in depth before Harry draws back to take a steadying breath and say, "We don't have to do this, you know."

Tom shrugs with one shoulder, tipping his head towards it. "No," he agrees, his smile not reserved but not a patented Paris beam, either. "Not if you don't want to. But you know me. I'm game."

Harry wants to say that he wasn't thinking of himself, but once more, the words won't come. "Yeah, me too," Harry responds instead. He decides to try and salvage his nobler motives and explain, "It just didn't seem like that was what you had in mind, that's all."

Tom laughs, but it's like his smile, something between bravado and sincerity. "Thinking in triage," he offers, and maybe it really is an honest explanation. Kes may do most of the job Tom had been dragooned into taking in sickbay, but Tom and especially Kes both place more immediate emphasis on their patients' emotional wellbeing than might be standard, trying to compensate for the Doc. "But in my, ah, partially professional opinion, you were just freaked out. You're acting pretty normally, considering. You're not fixating on any specific thing, and you're not refusing to talk about it. Makes sense you'd be out of sorts, but it seems like a pretty garden-variety case of 'what the fuck,' to me."  
It's not bust a gut funny, but it's so peculiarly _Tom_ a way of putting it that Harry has to laugh too. "Is that the clinical term?"

"It's more that I'm glad it doesn't seem to need one, to tell you the truth," Tom says, a wry look on his face. "But it did sound like you had plans. Care to elaborate?"

Harry wets his lips. "Mm, well," he hesitates, casting a glance down Tom's body. "I did already seem to be in more than capable hands." Harry can't tell what exactly did it for Tom, somewhere along the way here, the way he'd been touching Harry, the kiss or the tension, maybe a faster than light reaction to Harry's lowered tones, but something has gotten to him, and Harry doesn't hesitate to insinuate a hand between his legs and rub with the flat of his hand.

"Harry—" Tom's eyes slide shut with his gasp. "You're giving me mixed signals about what exactly you want, here.”

Harry withdraws his hand just enough to tug Tom's shirt loose and work his fingertips underneath to stroke just below his navel, and Tom groans. This is a spot he's learned well - close enough to make Tom want to be touched and give the promise, far enough to not really provide the desired stimulation, and he knows if he keeps it up long enough Tom will start going out of his mind. The discovery had been quite accidental, just something he'd been doing idly during one of their post-coital, still closer-than-they-ought-to-have been but otherwise normal conversations. Harry hadn't even been paying enough attention to notice until Tom’s breath had been hitching audibly and palpably, but now he appreciates it immensely. For him, it would be a tickle at worst and a pleasant distraction at best, but on Tom it's a spot he can play for as long as he retains the patience.

He's sure Tom stopped buying that he didn't know what he was doing a long time ago, and if he hadn't Harry's certainly given it away now, going straight from his cock to his belly like that. Harry keeps teasing at the fluttering muscles under his fingers and whatever demeanour Tom has obviously been trying for has already dissipated. His breathing's quickened and his eyes are half lidded, and - forget it, Harry decides at the sight of him. If Tom will give himself over this freely, Harry isn't going to deny him, not when he's this responsive. "If you want to take over, I'm not going to stop you," Harry says, but even though it's sincere he can hear the silky note in his own voice broadcasting all too clearly that he doesn't expect it will happen. "I'd be perfectly happy with that."Tom makes a soft, pained noise, and Harry thinks it sounds something like he's trying to convince himself that's what he _does_ want. Harry doesn't want to think too hard about why that might be; there shouldn't be any shame in it. There's something here, all right, something Harry's been curious about for awhile. Right now he finds he's not above trying to spur Tom on, though he couldn't say whether it's because he relishes the thought, wants to relieve some of his own guilty feelings, or just wants to see if he can make it happen."You know, I do I like you on your knees, Tom, but I'd like to think I've given you good reason to think you might like me on mine just as much," Harry continues, a little surprised at himself. It takes longer than this, usually, to get himself to talk this way, and he does feel the hint of awkwardness he always does - it _feels_ like a cheesy line; it feels like something even Tom might not try, even if it suits Harry’s goal and his sentiments - but Tom just stills and stares at him, wide eyes trained on him with all the intensity he puts into a dicey firefight but utterly still rather than frenetic with the trance of it, and the effect of _that_ is enough to make Harry's discomfort irrelevant, even if it lingers. Circling a pointer finger around Tom's navel and watching his eyes flutter shut, Harry continues, "And you never ask me for much, so in the interest of fairness...""The hell with fairness," Tom blurts, breathless and clearly unconsidered, and a spike shoots through Harry's body at the rawness of it. It leaves him with the purely physical tingle of a receding adrenaline rush, not tied up in emotion this time but enough to make his hands flighty, need to move or touch to stay steady. Tom tries to correct his course, swallows, blushes, looks away from Harry’s face and says, “Whatever you want,” but by then it's too late; Harry’s off-kilter enough not to yield to his better sense.

“And what do you want?” Harry asks, all too cognizant that it's got more meaning than any time he's asked it before. “You’ve been trying… it seems like there's something you don't think you can tell me, but… there's something you want too, and I can't figure out what when you won't say.” He's got more than an inkling, almost a certainty, but there's a boundary here that he's not willing to breach without some kind of acknowledgment on Tom's part. “I do understand, I mean, if I've gone too far here, forget I asked. I'm not sure you _do_ want me to, though.”

“And now’s the time, is it.” Tom's voice is quiet and uninflected, flinty, but his face doesn't match up with his tone. He looks unsure, not in the startled but ultimately welcoming way he'd used to be, when this started, but in a way that strips years of hard, guarded living from his face and indicates he's got deep reservations about what he might say next. “Harry. It’s always when you've got something else to be upset about that you want to talk about this stuff, and I don't know that it would be fair of me—”

“It's not like that,” Harry says, frustrated despite the fact that he believes Tom's explanation of his current conflict and can see something he's hesitant to put a name to in it. “I know it's not easy to be honest about - about a lot of things. Sometimes it's easier to keep talking when you've already started, that was kind of why I thought… We were halfway there already. It just seemed as good a time as any.”

Silence hangs between them for longer than Harry would like, but he's gone too far to try and dismiss Tom now just because he's made _himself_ uncomfortable. Maybe it was too much to try and tackle all at once, but he's gotten them here and he’ll see it through, at least until Tom refuses him. Harry's never been one not to finish what he's started, not the first time he'd run into a classical piece that seemed impossible, not the time he'd been rejected from the Academy when he first applied, and not now.

Eventually Tom's shoulders jerk with what could be a sigh or a laugh, and there's something like a smile flitting warily across his face. “You really are a piece of work, you know that?” In another tone it could be an insult or an expression of frustration, but his face has given way to wry amusement and his voice is fond. “I was trying to help you get sorted out. I don't see how you figured on turning that into a conversation about my,” he stops to clear his throat, pained, “my sexual proclivities. Or lack thereof.”

“If it's a lack thereof or if you don't want to talk about it, that's fine, Tom.”

“Yeah, but it's not,” Tom says, resigned. “And you know that, or you wouldn't be asking. But you're really sure you want to do this now? I mean, if I were you, I'd want this whole ‘us’ - ‘me,’ that is - thing on the back burner right now.” Tom let Harry’s lapses in decorum go; Harry’s inclined to do the same for Tom, but his stomach flutters with the discomfort of it. This is, he realizes, becoming a habit, on each of their parts, something he doesn't need to analyze any more than Tom’s reactions to start drawing tentative conclusions. “You asked me to go, and I'd get it, if that was what you wanted.”

“No,” Harry says, right away, and he sits up to set his hand on Tom's shoulder, neutral ground out of his reach before he does. Tom's posture eases under his touch, the fit of pique or self-retribution he could well have worked himself into beginning to evaporate. Tom had been trying to be there for him, the way Danny or B’Elanna might, and they wound up here, instead. Tom's unorthodox method of trying to comfort him aside, this is Harry's doing, and he rushes to add, “I don't.” He bites his lip. “But I botched this pretty badly, didn't I?”

“You did?” Tom echoes, incredulous. “I was the one…”

“You were trying to be there with me in case I needed it, that's all,” Harry insists. He doesn't want Tom blaming himself, but neither does he really have the energy to delve into the five reasons Tom might have privately decided this whole thing was his fault by now but won't be willing to discuss anyway. Not when Harry’s got one, singular, and it's cut and dried. “And I appreciate it. You were trying to be a good friend, that's all. I don't want you to think - I'd have wanted you with me either way. I doubt I'd have asked, but I don't think I wanted to be alone.”

“You didn't have to be,” Tom says, avoiding his eyes again. “And I didn't think - what, did you think I thought I had to? It's not a chore, Harry, but you - d’you know everyone else on this ship figures _I'm_ the one who's hard to keep up with? I didn't think you were still going to be awake enough to talk at all, and then you had us at warp 9 in the other direction!”

"It's a talent?" Harry offers with a palms-up shrug, and Tom snorts, shaking his head. "We really can forget this whole thing."

They're still sitting, still too close to be strictly friendly, and something shifts in Tom's expression and leaves him with a smirk that doesn't seem to be covering anything else, this time. "I think I might have a better idea, if you want to meet in the middle."

"Oh?" Harry asks, interest piqued and feeling more relieved than he should be."Well," Tom says, eyes back to being fixed right on Harry's own and voice low even though his cheeks have stained again, "you could fuck me."

Sometimes Harry feels like Tom's perpetually a step ahead of him, because he feels like he should have guessed. It's nothing completely new for either of them, though less so for Tom, Harry knows, because they've talked about this sort of thing more in depth than they probably would have for friends talking shop and trying to prove something to one another.

It's nothing that hasn't occurred to him, that he hasn't wondered about late at night alone in bed - what it would be like to have Tom underneath him as needy and tractable as he so often gets - but Tom's never brought it up when they were in a position to act on it, and Harry hasn't done it for long enough that maybe he has the same concerns he'd used to with women. There had always been enough other things to amuse themselves with, besides. Things that served their purpose and didn't invite any further vulnerability.

The suggestion, though, low and husky and sincere... Harry has to close his eyes and breathe deeply, try to get a handle on himself. He'd thought his idle fantasies were just that, something he might never bother or get to act on, and hadn't been terribly put out by the assumption. Now... oh, God, it was one thing to think about and another to have offered to him so bluntly. Harry wets his lips and curls the fingers of his right hand around Tom's neck to keep him in place, feels the side of Tom's throat work against the base of his fingers. "Is this a you telling me what you want situation?"

And Harry has to backtrack there, because he'd been wrong a moment ago - _there_ it was, that wicked little grin on Tom's face that spoke of nothing but intent, that indicates something has come undone inside him and leaves his voice as smooth and smoky as the Scotch he prefers. "Hell yes it is," Tom says, and then, for a while, it's a race.

Harry's loathing of Starfleet uniform jackets has only deepened recently - he used to wear them a lot less as a cadet, after all, seldom when he was off campus, and Libby had usually been wearing something easier to get her out of, had been fond of float sundresses her midwestern upbringing gave her the constitution to wear year round. They're cut specifically for the person wearing them, sized to the millimetre by a computer and not in standard sizes like in the old days, and they're inevitably just that bit too tight to slip off comfortably off of someone else's shoulders. They are jackets, though, and that does provide the distinct advantage that as long as Tom's willing to help him by squirming a bit, Harry can manage to get it off him without having to move his mouth from Tom's. 

They do have to part for Tom to get rid of his sweater, which winds up pooled on top of Harry's own beside the bed for once instead of who knows where. Tom's hand comes up to Harry's cheek when they go to meet again and Harry wonders for a second why Tom hums like he's discovered something intriguing until Tom bypasses his kiss to rub his cheek against the two days’ worth of stubble Harry built up in San Francisco.

“Don't get used to it; I'd have to grow it out to keep it,” Harry warns, tilting his head to catch Tom's lips again and trying to urge him to a better position to push him down on the bed. Unlike the uniform jackets, these beds aren't the worst thing they could have to work on, just room enough for two people side by side to sleep in some semblance of comfort, but Harry's overzealous in straddling Tom and attacking his neck, and for a second they almost overbalance and wind up on the floor, save for Tom’s reflexes. He leans into Harry as quickly as he can when he feels the tipping start. It makes his pulse speed even further under Harry's mouth. Harry knows it's only atavistic panic but he can feel his own heartbeat start trying to keep pace, and it doesn't stop him from biting down to keep Tom quiet when he laughs faintly like he might want to say something.

“Damn, that's probably going to bruise,” Tom hisses through his teeth instead of whatever he was going to say, but the fingers he has knotted in the hair at Harry’s nape stay clenched to keep him there.

Not able to pull back without a fight, Harry tucks a thumb between Tom's jaw and ear on his opposite side, both for leverage and to feel the approving thrum he knows he'll get in response, and slides down Tom's neck instead to bite again at the tendon between neck and shoulder, more gently. It's sensitive enough there that he knows not to use much force, but still Tom quivers all over underneath him, letting him go with a quiet, broken sound.

“We’ll fix it after,” Harry says, nosing at the red, lightly indented patch he'd left behind.

“Maybe,” Tom agrees, noncommittal. There shouldn't be any maybe about it, even if Harry's not quite surprised he might like the thought of keeping the marks. It’s reckless, is what it is, and Starfleet may be a whole hell of a lot more liberated than military organizations past, but there's also no reason anyone would _have_ to walk around marked up this way, any more.

But he knows Tom won't say where from, and if he wants to piss off Chakotay and Tuvok, that's his business.

“Thinking too much,” Tom interrupts, ducking his head to suck in one of Harry’s earlobes. Not any more, that's for damn sure. It tickles badly enough to make Harry want to jerk away, but it also sends a jolt to his cock that disperses over the rest of his skin and makes him rock down against Tom, who pushes back, his answering noise too needy to be as smug as it would usually be.

“Pants,” Harry says, voice catching when Tom presses his hips up and traces the lobe of Harry's ear with his tongue again. “Off. Now.” Tom's mouth doesn't disengage entirely, his tongue moving from ear to jaw, but his hips settle and his fingers start fumbling with Harry's fly. He's made quick work of it by the time Harry growls and clarifies, “Yours.”

Tom chuckles, and there's the smugness Harry had expected, but his teeth sink briefly into his lip and his voice is a breathy purr when he accedes, “Yes, sir.” It’s not exactly teasing and it's not exactly surrendered acquiescence, but Harry thinks either Tom’s not sure which he's trying for or that he wants to be one and can't help being the other, so Harry lets him up and helps, pulling his pants and his underwear down in one movement when Tom's undone his own pants. 

With Harry on the edge of the bed like this, it seems entirely natural for him to lean forward and lick a trail up from the base of Tom's cock. Tom's hips flex and it slides slippery along Harry's cheek, which is a surprisingly interesting sensation probably just for its novelty, and Harry tries again, tilting his head to wrap his lips around the shaft before he works up it this time, sucking in the head when he gets there and flattening his tongue to work it in small circles against the tip.

“Shit, Harry,” Tom groans, the emphasis wrong on his name. He reaches down to catch hold of Harry's hair again and rocks forward, and while Harry adapts, he still pulls back with a pop and catches Tom’s wrist, prying him off.

“Hands behind your back,” he instructs, “and keep them there.”

He's had this streak of bossiness in him for some time, but he knows that's not entirely what this is; that it’s not the same as making Libby giggle and call him a Neanderthal or having someone remark that they hadn't figured he'd be so forceful, when what they'd really meant was what Tom had said once, _Who are you and what did you do with Harry Kim?_ This time he’s doing it because wants to see what Tom will do with it, and while the noise in his throat coincides with Harry rasping his roughened cheek over a hipbone, the loose parade rest Tom goes into almost immediately isn't something he'd do naturally in these circumstances. It wouldn't pass muster in a formal setting, either, but Harry doesn't care about that.

Harry wonders just how far this obedience might stretch and decides he needs to test it, so he sucks Tom back down and stops there, lingering. Tom doesn't move at all, but his legs are trembling, his forearms working as his hands grasp for purchase that's not there, and Harry slings an arm around his lower back and fits a hand over his hip to try and offer him some stability. He's only working with his mouth, neither the angle nor his level of dedication probably enough to get Tom off in any kind of reasonable timeframe, but Tom squirms and groans and rocks a little - not enough to be testing if he can get away with it, just enough that Harry thinks he probably can't help it without a concerted effort - and that's all Harry wants from this, for now. 

It's lazy, wet, and messy, pleasant in its ease and the increasing tenor of Tom's voice and the way he can press his own hips down into his mattress, and he might just stay down here and make long, leisurely work of finishing the job, if he didn't have other things in mind. If Tom wasn't saying, insistent, "Come on, please," keeping still enough it's clear he's trying, and whatever Tom gets out of following instructions, Harry thinks he himself must get just about as much from rewarding him for it - he might tease to see the changes he can elicit and the cracks he can make in Tom's otherwise implacable facade, but it's not about making him suffer. He really just wants to make Tom happy. It’s all he's ever really wanted with anyone - he could take care of things himself if there wasn't something crucial about the human connection - and if the way he can do that best is a touch unorthodox... well, as long as he can make Tom sound like this in the process, Harry will do it without reservation.

He definitely has a worthy distraction this time, though, and Tom doesn't sound like he's going to give Harry much peace if they keep on this way, so Harry shifts up on his elbow for a ballast and uses his free hand to tug where Tom's fingers are clasped around his own wrist, behind his back. "Come here, then, sit down," he says, more a gentle suggestion, this time, but Tom obliges him as easily as ever. It's an awkward, useless position now, all Harry can do is rest his chin on Tom’s thigh, but Tom’s fingers card through his hair and Harry relaxes into it, melting against him. Harry can't look at him from this position and maybe it's for the best, because his nerves settle a bit with the reprieve and Tom's fingers are unhurried enough on his scalp that Harry thinks maybe Tom needed it as badly as he seems to have.

“You should know,” Harry starts, feeling ridiculous and all of seventeen, all of a sudden, “that it's been awhile since I’ve done this, and I don't exactly think it's like riding a bike.”

“Well, the bit about riding seems appropriate,” Tom says, fingers brushing through a catch he's found in Harry's hair, and if there's warm amusement in his voice at his own awful joke there's some trace of hesitation as well.

“We don't have to,” Harry repeats again, and now he feels foolish, because whatever he'd been playing at, he's given the lie to it now.

Tom twitches with more of that almost laughter. “Yeah, but I want you to, though. And I'm probably in recent enough practice to make this easy. There weren't exactly a lot of women around in my neck of New Zealand, Harry, but by now you might have guessed it didn't exactly make a monk out of me.”

“But did you…” Harry doesn't know how to say it and maybe he shouldn't, period, but he's got a suspicion he doesn’t like. “It was never something you didn't want,” he clarifies.

Another telling stutter in Tom’s fingers, but his voice is firm when he says, “Oh, god, no, you must've seen way too many old vids. Wasn't always the nicest thing in the world - might've been short on the comforts that generally improve the experience, but no. Federation’s pretty damned high minded, next to the old days. I can’t say for sure no one was ever… I mean, I know it happens,” he admits quietly, “but it was a good way to get a one way ticket to iso and who knows how much longer thrown on your sentence. It was… good of you to ask,” Tom adds with distaste that Harry can't fault him for, given it wasn't the best thing he could have said to set a mood. “But no, Harry, nothing like that. I told you,” he continues at a chirp, “I just want you to fuck me. Practicalities aside, it didn't look like you had a problem with that.”

Harry’s heart stutters a single hard throb through his whole body, and he says faintly, “No. Definitely not.” He rolls over and twists up for his nightstand, explaining unnecessarily, “We’re going to need…”

“Yeah,” Tom agrees, smirking, “that’s one of those creature comfort things I was talking about. Can't highly recommend most of the substitutes.” Tom leans in and plucks the bottle Harry’s come up with out of his fingers to forestall any further remark, sets it towards the end of the bed, and then prods at Harry's shoulder to turn him again. “I'm also fairly sure we're going to need your pants off.”

“You don't say,” Harry mutters, but he lifts his hips to help and doesn't argue when Tom goes to remove his pants. He's moving to sit up when Tom stops him with a hand on his chest.

“I've got this,” Tom says, lube in hand again, but Harry takes it from him when he flips up the cap. He'd rather help; he'd rather try first to get a renewed sense of this with his fingers than with his cock, and while watching has its appeal, he'd much rather be an active participant, as well.

“Let me,” Harry insists, not electing to share any of his rationale, only adding: “Please.”

Tom blinks at him for a moment, looking bemused, then laughs. “That's what's going to soften you up? ‘Let me finger you, please?’” He isn't mocking, just honestly entertained. “Provided you were any good at it - and I've got, oh, some reason to believe you were - you must have been a popular guy in school.”

Harry knows he's blushing, would know from the sensation in his stomach even if he couldn't feel the sudden sharp uptick in the blood flow to his face, and he knows Tom probably said what he did just to prove he could still provoke this reaction in Harry, his startled amusement besides. Whether it's the vulgarity or the implied compliment, Harry's always been better at _doing_ things than talking about them. 

Harry wants to be annoyed, but he can't muster it, not when Tom’s laughing still and pressing the bottle into his hand as he lays back on the bed. He sprawls with his arms stretched over his head, long and tawny and unaffectedly lackadaisical, his skin milk white in the way only long stretches of being ship-bound can provoke even in someone with his colouring but for the flush starting to work its way down towards his chest. Tom jokes that he looks sickly even though they supplement for the things that ought to be provided by the sun and they're better for the lack of exposure to it, modern starship radiation shielding being what it is, but Harry’s always found he makes an interesting study in contrast, like this, stark against even the bland, institutional beige of his bedspread.

“I figure you’ll have an easier time of it if you let me get reacquainted with that particular part of human anatomy before we get started, thank you,” Harry mutters, glaring with what must be very little ire. “Besides - never known you to be shy.”

“Not shy,” Tom says, grinning. “A little eager to get the show on the road, maybe.”

Harry wants to roll his eyes, but settles for grinning back. It's better not to encourage Tom at times like these, and playing along works better than exasperation. “That sounds like your problem, not mine, Tom. Up here,” he adds, catching Tom's knees and splaying them against the bed.

“You know, I don't think we'd still be doing this if you were usually so - _damn,_ that's cold - inconsiderate,” Tom quips, not losing the flow of his words at all in his complaint when Harry smears some of the lubricant against his ass and makes him shiver. “You'd think by now we'd have figured out a way -”

“I could show you inconsiderate,” Harry threatens, still without edge, too busy focussing on the shift and flex of Tom's muscles beneath his fingertip, judging slickness and tension and finding enough of the first and little of the second.

“Well, then, get on with it,” Tom goads. He tilts his head against the pillow, bats his eyelashes, and declares in a breathy falsetto, “Take me, soldier!”

“Ugh,” Harry says. “Not helping your cause. Breathe in.”

“Aren't we just setting a mood,” Tom teases, and Harry’s heard more than enough - Tom's covering for his own nerves now and he's not going to stop without some sort of decisive action. “What, next are you going to tell me to turn my head and - _ah._ ”

For a moment Harry’s pleased just to have dried up Tom’s apparently inexhaustible font of commentary, and he’ll realize later what a feat it was and just how mouthy Tom must have been being, that he was even able to even notice his enjoyment at Tom’s abrupt loss of verbal communication juxtaposed against that sudden little whine and the feeling of his finger snug in fluttering, adjusting heat, sinking in deeper even before he moved himself as Tom rocked back against the intrusion as best he could, flat on his back.

“All right?” Harry asks needlessly, studying the hand loosely draped over Tom’s still gape-mouthed face.

“Oh, my god, yes,” Tom enthuses. “Man, has it been too long. Come on, you said you’d take care of this, so take care of it.”

Harry can't help himself. He raises his eyebrows. “So that's what it takes to get you bossy, then? ‘Hurry up and fuck me?’ I could see that being a desirable trait, too.”

“Yeah, we’re a pair,” Tom mutters, eyes slit to an unfocused glower he’s not even attempting to aim at Harry, then shoots back: “I could see that meaning we should have been doing this six months ago, and that we should have gotten going on this instance about fifteen minutes ago; _damn it,_ Harry.”

And Tom’s body feels as eager as his words, because when Harry tests another finger at his opening, it slips inside as easily as the first, and Tom's reaction is no more restrained, though this time it's a tremor Harry feels to his toes, around and against him, and echoes. Yeah, Harry knows, it's supposed to be this easy when you've done everything right, with someone who wants it, but even the times he's enjoyed it on either side of the equation, it never has been for him. It gives him an idea he can't help but want to try, and though he's not certain Tom’s not going to try and kill him for the diversion, he goes ahead, probing and curling his fingers and making Tom look at him crossly until he finds what he's looking for and Tom arches up against him with a whimper.

“Yeah, I - I thought so,” he pants, threading his fingers through his own hair. “You would, wouldn't…” Harry presses the spot again, more forceful now he knows what he's looking for, and this time Tom just tips his head back and breathes deep and quavering through his mouth, his hands fisting. He's _quiet,_ and he doesn't try to finish what he'd been saying, and even if he weren't hot and throbbing around Harry's fingers and one of the best things Harry's ever set eyes on in his life right now, that would be enough to make him keep it up. One more stroke, then two, then a gentle, steady rhythm of alternating digits later, and Tom looks like he's in agony, flushed to his navel, squirming and gasping for breath, but he’s still not making any sound that has any sort of purpose. Harry wants to taste the salt of his sweat, hear the ragged breaths in offbeat to his own pace up close, but sense memory fills those things in and more than that he wants to see, though it may be the sweetest indecision he's ever known.

Tom's hard against his own stomach, leaking clear fluid onto it with each rise his cock makes in time with his ass clenching around Harry's fingers, and still Harry’s somehow surprised when he blurts, “Stop! You've gotta -” Harry slows to a stop but stays buried to his knuckles, still undecided. He aches, and he's not entirely convinced he wouldn't be just as happy to rub himself off against Tom's hip if it meant he got to finish the job this way, but then Tom pulls himself together with a visible effort, looks at him and insists, “I want you in me when I come,” plain and unadorned, and Harry doesn't even have a choice any more.

It's a simple physical request, Harry tells himself, no more, and resolutely puts his inability to refuse down to his own desire. “Okay,” he agrees, surprised to find his voice sounding rougher than Tom's when Tom adds at nearly the same time: “C’mere.”

Harry settles down to his side rather than over top of him, conscious of the precipice he'd left Tom teetering on now he's not throughly mesmerized, and is startled when Tom cups his cheek and kisses him, brief but consuming, and Harry thinks for not the first time that it's no wonder he doesn't want for company; right now Harry could very easily believe he's the only person in the world, as far as Tom’s concerned. It's intoxicating, to feel so… special, so integral to another human being, and if Harry's had it before, with Libby, that had been different because it had been entirely real, for more than just a moment.

This feels the exact same, and if Tom's like this with everyone, well - his magnetism makes sense.

“How?” Harry asks. “I don't want…”

“You're not going to hurt me,” Tom interrupts against his mouth, voice warm and amused. “And I'm more than good with whatever you want but I can't lie, I’m feeling pretty rubbery right now. Hey,” he says, like he's had an idea, “I've got it, I think.” He kisses Harry again, just a quick brush and a trace of tongue this time, and turns into his side. He reaches back to curl Harry's arm around him, like he might have missed the meaning. “There's some manoeuvring to get done here and we need more lube, but this sound okay otherwise?”

“More than,” Harry agrees fervently, quite all right with anything that means he gets to be inside Tom, by this point, and casts about blindly for the bottle he'd abandoned. He finds it with his calf and performs an awkward sort of shuffle with appendages not suited to the purpose to bring it within reach of his hand. He coats himself with a feather light touch, conscious of his own condition now, and asks, because he wants to be free to touch Tom, “Could you get your knee for me?”

Tom laughs under his breath. “Now he asks.” His answer is in his actions as he hikes up a leg and cants his hips back to offer himself. “Come on, fuck, I'm fine, do it.”

Tom’s groan matches Harry's when he slides the head of his cock in, swallowed up as easily as everything else, and Tom’s gasp and Harry’s moan commingle when Harry slams the rest of the way in after the lack of resistance, force contained by their position but sudden and unrestrained.

“Yeah,” Tom says, having the nerve to sound pleased with himself under his breathlessness, but then he's working his hips back, wiggling, and this time he sounds pleased only with Harry when he repeats, “Oh, yeah.”

“Mm,” Harry says, giving himself another pass on coherence for the way his face is buried in Tom's shoulder and he’s struggling to adjust. If he moves too fast, this could be over on his end entirely too quickly. Tom had asked him for one thing, and Harry wants to give it to him. He clutches and flattens himself to Tom’s back and thinks Tom must understand.

He must hold too tightly, though, because there's a trace of genuine concern in Tom's voice when he asks, “All right?”

“Fine,” Harry says, clearing his throat when his voice comes out thready. “Just… just, uh, thinking about parisses squares.”

Tom laughs, too startled for it to hitch with his breath, and tips his head to kiss the bit of Harry’s wrist bone he can reach. “That's baseball, Harry, but I appreciate the sentiment.”

The moment of levity relieves enough of the tension in his gut that Harry can rock forward tentatively, and Tom makes a soft, contented noise that Harry lets set their pace - he couldn't get rough like this if he wanted to, and there's something to be said for teasing what's nearly there out slowly. He slides his free hand down to squeeze Tom's cock, wetting the tip with the moisture there that hasn't yet gone sticky, and pumps it with his next slow slide. Tom goes virtually limp against him at that, mewling, and Harry spares a moment to find it endearing that the sounds he's making are every bit as given over as his body, that he's utterly unselfconscious about it. Guys aren't, always, or girls, though women tend to play act in the opposite direction.

Tom's close, through, and it’s not long before he's going rigid again with his impending climax, still letting Harry play his body but trembling with contained force, like it’s somehow something just out of reach for all that it’s just _there,_ and Harry knows the feeling; he's been in the same place, on the edge of something he knew would be shattering if it would only happen, and he knows it's on him to tip the scales, that Tom could get himself there with no more than Harry's giving him now but that it wouldn't be half what it could.

Harry sucks at Tom's earlobe and the sound Tom makes on his next drive home is sharper, more desperate, but it's still not quite enough, and Harry - Harry thinks he knows what to do with it, doesn't even think Tom would deny it, in this state, and he's too far gone himself to consider it much more than that.

“There you go, Tom,” he murmurs into Tom's ear. “You’ll get there, that's it, just breathe for me. Yeah, good,” he says, breathless, only half knowing what he's saying when Tom squirms and keens and tucks his chin to his chest, face scarlet with some hybrid of tension and embarrassment. “God, you feel good, and you're so close, aren't you? Let go, come on, there’s a good boy…”

Harry doesn't get as long as he'd like to be abashed at his words or gratified that he was right, that it’s simple nonsense praise that makes Tom uncoil in a snap and buck wildly, his cry hardly stifled by the audible, grinding clench of his teeth. Harry’s been keeping a careful cadence that’s been shot all to hell by Tom's orgasm, to say nothing of the sensation of Tom spilling hot and wet over his fingers or the pull his body exerts on Harry's own with his convulsions, and Harry's helpless to do anything but dig his nails into Tom's chest and press his forehead into the back of his neck and follow, blind and dizzy with pleasure and the sudden rush of oxygen he hasn't quite been allowing himself.

Tom's still shuddering violently and straining for air by the time Harry recovers enough to take proper note of it, but it's no great surprise. It’ll be ten minutes until he's willing to move on his own at all and another while before his legs will do him much good, if Harry's been reading him right. It doesn't give Harry much impetus to move, because Tom is tactile at the most impersonal and innocent of times, insinuates himself in Harry's space and stays there. He's not going to want Harry to move any more than he wants to himself, and while Harry's not nearly as wrecked, he feels warm and languorous and not at all averse to staying exactly where he is, sticky hand and all, contributing no more than the odd soothing sound and the stroke of his dry thumb across Tom's collarbone to the heap they've found themselves in.

When Tom's breathing has mostly levelled and his tremble has receded to a fine tremor beneath his skin, Harry asks softly, “Going to make it?”

“Not sure yet,” Tom croaks. “Talk to me in five. Or next year, maybe.” For a wonder, Harry does get another few minutes of silence out of him, during which they manage to disengage and Tom promptly nestles back just where he was before. He hears Tom make a contented hum, feels him swallow before he says, “That was - get back to me on that one, too. Why haven't we been doing that?”

There are several reasons, most probably Harry's because he'd never have presumed to offer and some Tom's because he hadn't either, but there's not a one that seems important, just now. “Don't know,” Harry says. “But considering I kept you quiet for a little while there and apparently put you at a loss for words, I'm thinking we could consider a repeat performance.”

Freer to do so than Harry, Tom stretches his arms out before him and points his toes, working out his muscles, sighs in a more usual but still sated manner, and jokes, “You’ll fall on your sword for the good of everyone else, then? What a very selfless sacrifice, Ensign Kim.”

“That's me,” Harry says, “noble to the core.”

“Pretty damn close,” Tom agrees, and Harry latches on to the teasing in his tone rather than the waver he's not entirely sure he heard. After, he says briskly, “Okay, I don't know about you, but I'm way too sticky for comfort - and you're not, because you ruined your comforter, honestly, Harry - I think I can potentially move exactly long enough to deal with it, for now. Also, oh, hell, Harry?”

“Yeah?” Harry lets Tom go and he twists, the alarm in his too-wide blue eyes undercut by the twist in the corner of his mouth.

“Baytart bangs the wall when you play the clarinet in here,” Tom points out. “And while there's an argument to be made for our having just made beautiful music together, if he doesn't appreciate the real stuff…”

“You handed the conn off to Baytart two hours ago, Tom.” Harry tosses a pillow after him as he saunters off to the ‘fresher, and the sound of the tap doesn't quite hide Tom’s snicker.

“And he's back,” Harry sighs to his briefly empty bedroom, knowing that, right now, he wouldn't change any of it if he could.


End file.
